Exile Without Arrival: Displacement, Memory, and Time in Lamentations
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Studies of forced migration frequently privilege movement: departure from a homeland, passage across space, and the construction of life elsewhere. Recent work on forced (im)mobility has complicated this model by attending to those compelled to remain amid conditions of violence. Lamentations pushes this complication further. Although the book names Judah’s exile, it does not follow the deported population to Babylon. Instead, its poems remain oriented toward Jerusalem, where geographical continuity masks the destruction of the relationships and practices through which place and communal time are produced. Bringing Lamentations into conversation with scholarship on displacement, relational place, migration temporality, and cultural memory, this essay argues that the book constructs displacement as the transformation of place and the rupture of temporal continuity through the interruption of cultic recurrence, the destruction of institutions’ ability to reproduce communal life, and the insecurity of inheritance and generational continuity. The poems formally stage the same disruption: memory preserves the world preceding catastrophe without making it recur, while lament, hope, and petition repeatedly open the present toward a possible future they cannot secure. “Exile without arrival” thus names Lamentations’ distinctive account of displacement: estrangement from a homeland that remains geographically present, from a past that remains available through memory, and from a future that can be imagined but not inhabited.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel17101231
Author: Cathleen K. Chopra-McGowan
Institution: Santa Clara University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W7223052022